Skepticism

EVENTS

Next week is Spring Break for me!

Yay! Taking it easy, lolling about on a sunny beach somewhere, sipping pina coladas and forgetting about classes and responsibilities…oh, wait. I booked trips to South Dakota and Alberta? WHAT WAS I THINKING??!?

I shall try to make do. Monday evening, on 12 March, I’ll be in Brookings, SD to talk about creationism. It’s only 3 hours away, I don’t know why I haven’t popped in there before.

On Thursday, 15 March, I’ll be in Calgary to talk about aliens to astronomers. This is a revamp of the talk I gave at TAM last summer; I’ve added some new stuff, though, which apparently requires a warning that the lecture is recommend for people over 14 years old. (I think that means Brownian may not be able to attend.)

Also…it’s my birthday on Friday. Due to the apparently quantal nature of human aging, I will be abruptly Old. Or Older. Something, anyway.

And yet another also…Mary and I have an anniversary next week! We’ll be celebrating separately in Calgary and Morris, but we can still party on the weekend when I get back.

PZ, I’m interested in your take on how alien we should expect aliens to be – I’ve been doing some work on SETI, but I’m trained as a radio astronomer, not as a biologist. Will your talk in Calgary be archived anywhere online?

The Telus Spark is our brand-spanking-new science center up here. I’ll miss the planetarium and laser light shows of the old downtown location, but it was getting embarrassing how small the exhibit space was compared to OSC, Vancouver’s Olympic golf ball (whatever that’s called) and Edmonton’s Odysseum (which I swear was designed by the same designer as a number of stateside ones).

So excuse the rough edges :) I hope all the A/V stuff has been sorted out; I haven’t been to any lectures up there yet, just general mayhem with the kids and the exhibits.

(Side note: if you go upstairs and play with one of the stop-motion camera stations, you can get it to e-mail you the final video)

It feels like this talk was on really short notice, though; I thought it would have showed up prominently here or via the Telus Spark newsletter. How quickly did this all get put together? Were you looking for a way of tormenting yourself with travel and lecturing in every spare day this year? :)

Ha, ha – just got a note back from my wife: “Register! Register now! You want to go, you *know* you do! :-D” Okay, my dear, my rubber arm has officially been crafted into a subtle helix.

Fair warning: I’m going to want to know if antennae, no noses, underarm gonads and males developing from females either with age or with a dearth of males are a kosher alien design.

You know who’d probably appreciate this stuff as well? The Calgary Comic Expo folks. They (or at least their predecessor) had a lighter talk along those lines a few years back; it would have been nice to have some more teeth on the panel :)

If you see someone in the audience very interested but half-asleep, my apologies, it’s the last day of the Prairie Developer’s Conference that day.

Side question: did you get married close to your birthday so that it would be easier to remember? :)

Drumheller is a trip to see. If you come at it from Calgary, all you see is miles of gently rolling prairie, then you go around a corner and a crack opens up in the earth and swallows you whole. Seconds later you’re driving in a steep walled canyon (hoodoo) and you can’t see anything else. One last corner and a city appears in front of you.

AFAIC, that alone is worth the trip out there. The museum is a bonus. The giant t-rex is pretty sweet too.

Trek’s hoomans-with-funny-foreheads-and-noses always bug me, but when you’re talking sentient beings… or even just social beings, how optional is bipedality? Is there a lower size limit on a sentient being in the presence of predators? (We know island inhabitants tend over time towards Homo fiorensis size) Two eyes more or less in the front of a face? (Eyes on stalks are a fun idea but are they practical at sentient being size?) How about tongues?

I know invertebrates lack them (do they have an equivalent?) but vertebrates have rarely-to-never done away with them – what sort of tongueless communication would be appropriate, or would such a creature evolve something like a tongue anyhow? There would have to be eyes; those have separately evolved so many freaking times on Earth – signalling the same but lots of details different – but they do seem to reduce down to two in number the larger the creature gets (know of any good exceptions?).

I’ll perhaps have to track down the fish in question. I know sex is a lot more fluid in fish and amphibians (well, in a grade-not-clade manner :)

I had in mind that in such a setup, as civilization progressed, it would be the ‘norm’ for there to be younger females and older males, and young males and older females would be the ‘outcasts’. Young males in particular would come from isolated areas under this scheme – in urban areas, the changes would be hormonally suppressed – and be derided in some manner as country bumpkins… or worse wherever there was, naturally, some untrue religious tale to account for what they were.

Gonads under the armpits would also make hugging a potentially gloriously rude or amorous gesture :)